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Microbes That Keep Us Healthy Starting To Die Off
Dr_Ken writes with a quote from Scientific American:
"The human body has some 10 trillion human cells—but 10 times that number of microbial cells. So what happens when such an important part of our bodies goes missing? With rapid changes in sanitation, medicine and lifestyle in the past century, some of these indigenous species are facing decline, displacement and possibly even extinction. In many of the world's larger ecosystems, scientists can predict what might happen when one of the central species is lost, but in the human microbial environment—which is still largely uncharacterized—most of these rapid changes are not yet understood. 'This is the next frontier and has real significance for human health, public health and medicine,' says Betsy Foxman, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health in Ann Arbor. Meanwhile, each new generation in developed countries comes into the world with fewer of these native populations. 'They're actually missing some component of their microbiota that they've evolved to have,' Foxman says."
Maybe we no longer need them?
am saddened by the death of our microbial overlords (or underlords as the case may be).
WHAT A SCOOP!!! I want pictures! Pictures of microorganisms! Where's Parker?
I have Crohn's, as many news studies are showing it is largely caused by (the major symptoms at least) lack of certain intestinal flora. My sister was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis after they found a large tumour in her intestines. So I for one hope more attention is focused on our little commensural buddies.
Just go back to nature, eschew all this horrible modern sanitation and antibiotics, they are all poisoning you. Of course you expected lifespan will be changed from ~80 to about 35, but at least you won't be destroying our precious internal ecosystem. Come on, take one for the team!
Brett
The logic doesn't follow entirely. Just because something's been there or done a certain way in the past doesn't make it necessary for the future. Clearly you don't want to be born with everything your parents have. That's why we put antibiotics in the eyes of every newborn in developed countries. The antibiotics prevent chlamydial/gonorrheal blindness in newborns. That being said, it's something to think about and evaluate scientifically - so far it's very early to make any decisions about this stuff given the real lack of data.
Unless I feel like I'm at death's door, I do not go to the doctor. I'll bet most of the people who are missing these microbes have been exposed to a lot of antibiotics. This may also explain why staph infections are turning deadly, and I know it's why Western kids have lots of strange allergies.
The Hadza are the last hunter gatherers in the world, probably. They seem to be doing alright. (Not saying I'd give up my lifestyle, but there are lessons to be learned.)
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/12/hadza/finkel-text
regret the defeat of our former microbial underlords.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Hey, here is another thing we haven't thought much about. I don't know how it would affect us, but it could be, like, super heavy important.
this is why we need to let our children interact with other people and go out and play in the dirt. I did and let me tell you, I do still get sick but not as much as some of my friends who had lived sheltered lives with there parents who thought that every little cold they got they would need to go to the doctors to be treated for it. we now live in a world with Sissies who can't take life's discomforts like there parents.
Just dismiss any investigation of it as backwards or some form of vapid tree-hugging, don't study it, and ignore any problems until peoples' expected lifespan returns to 35!
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
The presence of neutral microbes offers resource competition against random microbes taking up residence, especially harmful ones.
Since there is competition, new Microbes of any sort, are less likely to flourish unchecked, than if there was no competition.
Think of how many computer users would be using MacOS or Linux KDE, if Windows didn't exist, or if Microsoft were to suddenly drop dead and stop making new versions of Windows that were successful at competing for placement on people's computers.
The loss/extinction of some of these neutral, or even beneficials microbes could be quite bad, if it makes humans more vulnerable to spontaneous intrusion by others and digestive system issues.
The less diversity in the neutral microbes... the more likely that a malicious microbe releases one toxin that happens to kill them all.
Don't believe a word of it, unless you buy the stock or are a patent holder.
Reading the original article, I notice a complete lack of facts. Were there any statistics about relative declines in gut flora in various populations? Or particular flora that are disappearing.
I find the hypothesis pretty unlikely to be honest, but that can be a good thing in hypothesis... if someone can start presenting some facts to back it up.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
That supposed total of 110 trillion cells overall weigh about 150 pounds. Are the microbial cells really something like 1% the weight on average of a human cell? 100 trillion microbial cells seems hard to believe.
--
make install -not war
midi-chlorians
Consuming a few "sliders" will re-populate lots of gastro-intestinal things.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Parent is correct in pointing out this basic failure to recognize the problem with averages in statistics.
In addition, abortions can also be counted as early deaths.
We already save many that would naturally die which has skewed the average even further. If the technology froze, one would expect the average to go down as the genetic defects live long enough to reproduce and increase the defect rates possibly leading to complications medicine can not fully counter.
Just think about it -- a dominant defective trait allowed to continue leads a large demographic of people (or all humans) who have some sort of defect that requires advanced technology to continue the species... The makings of an interesting science fiction story?
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
This summary is suggesting that our bodies house 110,000,000,000,000 cells total? Why do I find that hard to believe? 110 TRILLION?? really? Could i see some math on that please?
NOT MY MIDI-CHLORIANS!!
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
*GASP* I shudder to think how this will affect the growing colon cleasing industry. Will it be destroyed or will the industry adapt with new "microbial ecosystem replacement" products?
Obviously the USA - whether they knew it or not - is 100% to blame. We should tax them and redistribute the wealth to those less fortunate to make up for it.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The Hygiene hypothesis postulates that the seeming rise in food and other allergies and auto-immune diseases like Crohn's coincides with the rise in hygiene in the developed world.
The immune system evolved in an environment with many more challenges from both symbiotic and parasitic organisms. Excessive hygiene shifts the equilibrium towards the immune system attacking itself.
If fact, Helminthic therapy has shown promise in Crohn's. Infecting patients with parasites or the killed eggs of parasites give the immune system something to chew on other than your own mucosa.
This is a good a reason to breed your own microbes contained within Home brewed Beer and Wine, Sauerkraut, Kim-chi, Sourdough, and Kombucha. http://www.wildfermentation.com/ And set the stage for microbal growth in your local farm soil ecosystems, by participating in and supporting organic agriculture.
Yes, for all of the hopelessly stupid people out there. If you feel like you are sick and you don't have a cold, go to a doctor to find out what it is. If your lymph nodes stay swollen for some reason, go to the doctor. If you have unexplainable pain, go to the doctor. When you get to a certain age, turn and cough. However, if you come down with the sniffles, suck it up and don't run to get Tamiflu and antibiotics shoved up your ass just because.
Christ almighty. I hope they never take the warning labels off small electronics. Otherwise you'll probably end up trying to use your Bagelator in the bathtub.
But the average longevity is only going up because of fewer early adult deaths. Longevity only considers those that reach adulthood.
Basically you are flat out wrong. The maximum expected age hasn't moved much. The rates of death for all younger years has been going down for many centuries.
The 99th percentile may have always lived about the same length of time. The 50th percentile are living much longer now.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I hope you never get cancer. If you finally go to the doctor when you fell like you on death's door, it will be too late. If caught early enough, most cancers are easily treatable.
You could say the say the same for hundreds of other life-threatening conditions. Swine Flu among them. But the contagious disease makes you a danger to everyone.
Seems that most products advertised today pull on the "santize everything you touch" FUD that's out there. I work at a large technology company, and they recently installed automated hand sanitizers by every external door. I read an article recently that claimed that EMC was having cleaning crews sanitize every doorknob in their campus once a week.
This isn't just a corporate activity, I've got a friend with a 5yr old son in that the son has been conditioned to ask mom for Purel every 5-10 minutes. I also find it funny that kids are being taught to eat a McDonald's burger by holding the wrapper. The funny part is that the people making the burgers aren't wearing gloves...
Reminds me of the old joke: A Harvard and MIT student, both just finished using the urinal and the MIT student walks towards the door. The Harvard student says, "Hey, at Harvard they teach us to wash our hands after using the urinal!" The MIT student fires back, "At MIT they teach us not to pee on our hands!"
In the past we got a lot of the microbacteria that our bodies need from our food supply. With the invention of herbacides, fertilizers and various other modern farming "advancements", the food supply has become less diverse. The digestive system is one of the first lines of defense for the immune system. Anyone who is concerned about their digestive health can start with a good probiotic supplement. I like Jarrow Labs EPS probiotic. There are many others on the market though.
Wait! Is there 10 x more "not-me" than "me" in me?
"The human body has some 10 trillion human cells—but 10 times that number of microbial cells."
So it's like we are all parasites of microbial colonies?
We needed another crisis, gotta get that government program in place.. appoint a 'microbe czar'... raise our taxes.. save us!!
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I am someone, who always seeks to find simple rules that describe complex mechanisms and patterns. And if there is one all-encompassing mechanism in nature, that can be described by simple rules, it’s that of the cycles and balances.
In our bodies, as in all of nature.
See, they are complex systems of interacting cycles, that are in perfect balance.
If you change something... anything... no matter how small it seems... it influences the whole cycle. Then it can create a feedback loop. And it can spread to related cycles. And so on, and so on...
Until in the end, it falls into another less perfect balance... or everything dies.
Until now, we always had luck, since the cycles often had good fallback mechanisms that made them still run stable for decades.
A good example for the body, are most of those “age-related” diseases. They don’t come because of old age. They come with old age. They are the reason for a not-so-stable cycle/system that starts to fail after decades. So nearly nobody links them to the original cause. Usually it’s caused by pushing a cycle out of balance for decades.
The exact same thing happens on a global level with nature. The machine slowly fails. But since the duration between action and punishment is no extremely slow, and since we humans learn by association, we do not learn from our misbehavior.
And later, we go to the doctors, let them give us tons of pills for everything, and even the doctors tell us the lie, that “it’s just because you’re old”. (Mind you, that of course there are some things that really are because of old age. But e.g. gout and hair loss definitely aren’t.)
Also until now, it did not affect our ability to reproduce. So it really did not matter that much.
But in the last years/decades, infertility rates rose dramatically, and the overall effort to keep ourselves alive and (in the illusion of being) “healthy” rises and rises.
I once extrapolated a graph of those infertility rates, and by my prediction, if it does not flatten out somewhere, all humanity will be unable to reproduce in around 3 generations.
I just hope we will notice, until it’s too late. But I don’t expect everyone to notice. Natural selection will finally do its job again. :)
So I decided, to also become a hacker on another level. To hack world’s most advanced machine: The human body.
So that even if most of humanity goes down the drain, I (my genes any my ideas) will be one of the few, who will be left.
And I think for people like us here on Slashdot, who pride themselves in being so good with such complex machines, that would be the ultimate mastery, wouldn’t it?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I take it you never heard the radio ads for "nature's healthy trinity" (an intestinal flora repopulating capsule product consisting of three bacterial lines that you'll find in most brands of yogurt.)
In fact many brands of yogurt contain five beneficial bacterial lines and are a fine way to repopulate your gut if the antibiotics (or "colon cleansing") have thrown the population out of balance.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The vast majority of bacteria are either harmless or beneficial to their human host. Only a very small number of bacteria are pathogenic, and most of the time your body does a great job keeping those out. Here's a great book for bacteria spotters, amateur and pro, which tells you how to find bacteria without a microscope.
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=3864
http://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Bacteria-Comstock-Book/dp/0801488540
We swam in the Hudson..." (video)
R.I.P. funnyman.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I work in IT. We don't bathe too often.
This causes autism. Run with it, crazy rumor mill. I expect to see this in the news when I wake up Monday morning.
By Wednesday, parents will be mixing dirt into cereal and formula in the hopes of increasing microbial ppm.
What is going on was planned, and it is an old plan.
7 of the 9 deadly persistent poisons are being reintroduced.
Subclinical antibiotics are mandatory for production farm animals.
Watch Food Inc. and know that even it does not cover it all.
The top youtube video has a MD named Rima Laibow talking
about Codex and What it means and it is now law world
wide in over 150 countries.
The warning was sounded years ago.
Proof that what she says has been happening is seen
in the film Reversing Diabetes in 30 days.
We are all being slow killed on purpose, and the proof
is in this post, and if you want to stick your head in the
sand and think Rule #1 of the Georgia Guidestones
is some kind of Hoax then you will meet you fate
earlier than most.
Good Luck to you all !
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Go visit older cemeteries that are pre 20th century. Much higher infant mortality rate and so on, but still a lot of old people who lived comparable ages to old folks now. That higher infant mortality rate plus more women dying in childbirth ran down the raw numbers. Another major cause of skewed statistics are wars, where dis-proportionally younger stronger males still succumbed, possibly really altering what would have been the real numbers due to health concerns.
Not to say modern medicine hasn't helped, sure it has, just the issue is more complex than just old days-die younger, modern days-die later.
Whew! Another global catastrophe averted!
...now has scientific backing. Go ahead, pick up that chip that fell on the floor and eat it. When someone gives you a look, just tell them you are maintaining a healthy microbial diversity.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
"With rapid changes in sanitation, medicine and lifestyle in the past century, some of these indigenous species are facing decline, displacement and possibly even extinction."
is unlikely to be affected.
Trying out a new doctor (an MD), they interviewed me a bit and when they heard I'd been on a bunch of antibiotics recommended I purchase a three month supply of probiotics. They also recommended I drop taking allergy drugs after being on the priobiotics after a few weeks. A few weeks later, no more allergy symptoms and no need for allergy drugs any more. This doctor actively reads and publishes in medical journals, but it still surprised me that they recommended probiotics.
More like the reef structure built up by the coral maybe?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
I shudder to think how this will affect the growing colon cleasing industry.
Huh? When I do colon cleansing, there are no antibiotics or stuff involved. How would that affect this industry?
Surely climate change is at least partially responsible for this impending crisis of gastric proportions.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
They need to do way instain host> who kill their bactreia. because these bactreia can't frigth back? It was on the news this mroning, a host in mi who had kill her three billion bactreia . They are taking the three billion bactreia back to ann arbor too lady to rest my pary are with the bactreia who lost its cell divsioins ; I am truely sorry for your lots
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Just to put out my unscientfic, uneducated on the subject thoughts, but don't you have to survive the infection? An extreme, and possibly poor example, compare the affects of smallpox on Native Americans and Europeans after 1700 or so. The Native Americans, with no ancestral exposure to smallpox or cowpox were devastated by smallpox when exposed, while the Europeans were less affected.
So, do I want to be exposed to someone's unwashed filth, knowing that it will make be stronger, if it doesn't kill me? Do I want to transfer it to my car or my home, maybe intentionallly expose my family to it, just to make them stronger? In the comparison of the Native Americans and Europeans in the 1600 - 1900's, the less clean Europeans won, but how many lives did that genetic immunity, if there is such a thing, cost?
In the end, cleanliness is cultural, and might just be another case of "Play Now, Pay Later".
Getting back on topic, I doubt that washing whatever gets upon my hands in the restroom, or from using the keyboard of a coworker with snot dripping from his nose, impacts my favorable gut bacteria much. Alcohol consumption, and not replenishing them with cheeses or yougurts, stuff like that is what leads to their decline.
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." - Adolph Hitler
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History of Medicine Feed @ Feed Distiller
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Microbiology Feed @ Feed Distiller
I personally do not opine that there will be worrying change in our microbial ecology. Westerners have been consuming acidic foods for ages, including acidic tea, acidic coffee, acidic meat, and more recently, acidic soda. These foods alter the pH of our digestive tract, and correspondingly, our microbial ecology. But hey, we've survived. It can't be worse than an explosion in obese people, can it?
I wonder if there could be a connection between a decline in certain microbial life that could correlate with an incline in the rate of autism. just a thought I had...
Nowadays it seems everyone has become a germaphobe. Hand sanitizers in every office, school, many homes. Then there are all the fungicides, pesticides, anti-virals, and antibiotics, that we are consuming whether intentionally or not.
And speaking of antibiotics it seems everything is tainted with them, one of the most common is Triclosan. Here is a list: http://drbenkim.com/articles/triclosan-products.htm You might be surprised at some of the products that it's in.
That post says waayyyy too much...
"If I deny, it don't apply." So you force your Assistant Mayor Equivalent to drink Cholera...
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
We need more orgies